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Monthly Archives: July 2009

Phew! I’m back from my mini-vacation. I had a lovely time in Montréal and in Ottawa. Who says you have to go far to have fun? I did miss my computer though, so it’s good to be home again with hound and cat in my tiny house.

If you haven’t been to Montréal, you must go. You will eat poutine (yes, even in July). You will discover charming little tea shops and cafés. You will feel all Euro and you will not have even paid for a plane ticket. If you are really, really lucky, you might just stumble onto a street festival and be luckier still to see L’Orchestre d’Hommes-Orchestres in action. Check it out:

Ah those kooky Montréalers. How do they come up with this stuff? Pure. Artsy. Awesomeness.

After that (which was so fantastic we could have come home straight away and still had a fabulous vacation), it was on to Ottawa, where I stood underneath this for a while:

She lives just outside the National Gallery of Canada and she is creepy, but kind of sweet. Her name is Maman and her legs remind me of the Other Mother’s hand in Coraline (don’t you think?). I did lots of other things beside stand underneath a giant spider, but I am too tired to tell you about them now. There will be book reviews tomorrow or the next day.

I’m heading off on vacation all of next week (I guess it’s possible to go on vacation even when you are have already technically been on vacation for three weeks. Vacation from vacation?) So I’m going away to Montreal to eat pastry and bistro food and poutine (do people eat poutine in July?) and to do all sorts of artsy things. For reading I’ll be bringing:

I had hoped to be super organized and to prepare posts to go up all through next week, but it didn’t happen. A girl gets busy when she’s on holiday. As they say in Montreal, “Tant pis!”

I love this poem. Unfortunately I can’t seem to figure out how to get silly WordPress to let me fix up the indents properly, so you don’t get the full effect. Still lovely.

The Grasshopper – by Conrad Aiken

Grasshopper
grasshopper
all day long
we hear your scraping
summer song
like
rusty
fiddles
in
the
grass
as through
the meadow
path
we pass
such funny legs
such funny feet
and how we wonder
what you eat
maybe a single blink of dew
sipped from a clover leaf would do
then high in air
once more you spring
to fall in grass again
and sing.

For some reason, when I read Laini Taylor’s amazing fantasy Blackbringer last year, I kept thinking, “I’ll bet she’d be good at writing something romantic.” I’m not talking Harlequin romance here people, I just mean a seriously romantic story. What can I say? I was right, and I’ve got Lips Touch to prove it.

I’m not generally a reader of short stories, so when I saw that Lips Touch: Three Times was a collection of short stories, my initial response was, “Too bad,” plus shoulder shrug. Well good news folks! The three tales in Laini’s book are each long, long enough to be broken down into chapters, in fact. That is to say, they are pretty substantial short stories, which is all good, because man can Laini Taylor write. Each of the stories is about a kiss. In the first, a girl who has always been an outsider finally gets noticed by the smoldering new guy at school. She fantasizes about kissing him, but she has no idea what the consequence of that kiss will be. In the second story, Ana has lived her whole life burdened by a curse. If she speaks, all who hear her will die. She has kept silent for years but now she is in love and she longs to break her silence to tell her suitor her true feelings. The final story introduces us to a girl who discovers the real reason why her mother never lets them stay in one place for long. She comes from a strange and violent other world, where a brutal and beautiful Queen rules over dreadful soulless creatures. The Queen and the girl are fated to meet. Shivery yet?

Laini Taylor has a wonderfully rich descriptive style, which helps you to imagine the characters, the settings and the worlds she creates to perfection. Here is a passage from the first story that reveals the gorgeousness of the prose:

” Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy’s blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn’t possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer’s small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear and indigo veil against a stinging sand, just like the nomads. Kizzy wanted.”

Um… wow. There are authors who don’t succeed in giving readers as much sense of a character in the space of an entire novel, let alone in a single paragraph. That’s just one example. Another treat? I never saw the endings coming. That could be because Laini is loaded with creativity (definitely), and it could also be because you are always fully immersed in the moment of the story (again, definitely). You can’t put down this book without appreciating that Laini Taylor pays serious attention to crafting her work. It’s impressive and wholly satisfying for the reader. Here’s a writer who cares about details.

To make this even better, I think Lips Touch is going to be one gorgeous book. Aside from that cover, which is creepy/sexy/fantastic, each one of the stories is preceded by pages of illustrations by Jim Di Bartolo, Laini’s husband, another superbly talented individual. At her blog, Laini has already cheered about how beautiful the book will be. I can’t wait to see the final printed version.

Lips Touch is coming in October 2009. You will have to buy it. Absolute proof that Twilight is so not the last word on forbidden love.

Lips Touch: Three Times is published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic. Note that material quoted is taken from the ARC and may differ from the bound book.

*The winners of the audiobooks have been drawn! Thanks to all those who entered. The winners are: HOLLY and PRIYA! Enjoy your listening ladies!*

Lucky ducks! I have two Alyson Noel audiobooks: Evermore and Blue Moon and I am giving them away. If you are a fan of this New York Times bestselling series then I know you will love listening to the books. Katie Schorr gives a great reading. I will draw 2 winners, one for Evermore and one for Blue Moon. The giveaway is open to residents of Canada and the U.S. only. (Sorry – not enough pennies saved for international shipping costs!) I will announce the 2 winners on August 4th.

Rules:

1. To enter the draw, leave a comment below. (All you have to write is “Please enter me!” Nothing fancy). Make sure if you leave it anonymously that I have a way to contact you via email.

2. For an extra entry, blog or tweet about the giveaway and leave a link in the comments.

Before you begin,
you’ll need quiet and fading light,
(almost dusk is best)
solitude,
and a whimsical frame of mind.

Sweep away
all traces of melancholy
trapped under small stones.
Scatter trees,
tall, slender-trunked and leafy.
Brush egg-blue sky between
the tallest branches.
Cover the earth with wildflowers.
Weave a path through the grass
for midnight visitors.
Dot with nooks,
hidden spots and strange treasures
in stranger places:
one flame red feather,
a snip of velvet ribbon,
something that glitters.

A whisper of wing beats
will tell you it’s ready,
rustling bluebells
say it’s time to leave the rest
to magic.

Been looking for a mystery starring a grade 9 nerdy guy / wannabe P.I. who is pretty clueless with the ladies, loves cooking class and who is crazy enough to start investigating some of the coolest kids in school? Look no further than Susan Juby’sGetting the Girl: A Guide to Private Investigation, Surveillance and Cookery. This book has a lot going on – a high-stakes mystery, some really funny moments, a sharp critique of high school social hierarchies, even a little cooking, which all combined, makes for a unique and entertaining reading experience.

Sherman Mack just started high school and he definitely falls in the social category of “almost invisible.” Sure, he has a couple of friends, and he isn’t the biggest loser ever, but he is far beneath the notice of the real social players at Harewood Tech: the cool guys and their “Trophy Wives.” Sherman has a thing for Dini Trioli (the tenth-grade goddess who humors his attentions), detective novels (recommended by his friend Vanessa) and cooking class. Sherman might wish his mom was a little older, a little less into burlesque dancing and a little more into cooking and cleaning, but all in all, things could be a lot worse. The only thing that Sherman really worries about is the infamous practice of “defiling” that goes on at Harewood Tech. Every so often, a girl’s picture gets put up on all of the school bathroom mirrors with a D written next to it, and after this happens, she is completely cut out of every social group. That’s after she is publicly shamed and her reputation is dragged through the mud to the point that school life becomes utterly miserable. Sherman is worried because he suspects that Dini might be next in line for defiling. He decides to go undercover to find out who is responsible and to save any more girls from this humiliating and cruel fate. Sherman discovers that detecting, like getting the girl of his dreams, is not as easy as it looks.

Why you’ll like it? Sherman is a riot, without being a caricature. He bumbles around and makes mistakes and seems totally real. All of the other characters, even the ones who appear in only a few scenes, are just as well-drawn, so that you can imagine whole stories about them beyond the book. I especially liked Sherman’s mentor Fred King, who loves cooking and gardening and is surprisingly cool if you can get past the comb over. Mrs. Samuels, Sherman’s cooking teacher, is great too, always offering up wisdom about what it’s like to work in the food industry. I think what appealed to me most in this book is the fact that Susan Juby has produced a book that communicates just how brutal the effects of high school cliques can be, except she has managed to make her book funny. It never feels like one of those serious reads about the trauma and pain of high school, but it will make you think just as much. I’m hoping it’s a series, because I’d like to see what Sherman solves (and cooks) next.